Last Fight of the Valkyries (2 page)

Liam smiled broadly when he saw the Boy Scout uniforms. He'd
recently spent a lot of time in a camp built around a Boy Scout
property in the southern suburbs of St. Louis, and the fact they came
to rescue him warmed his heart. He half-expected his mother and
father to appear, but he couldn't see them.

The chatter of gunfire prompted him to move faster. The big
chaingun on top of the truck remained silent. It should be easily
chewing up zombies.

Like so many times of the past few weeks since the zombie plague
began, he ran for his life. He turned to look at his tiny grandma and
her hideous pinkish-red pantsuit. Her white hair was a stark contrast
to her lower body—which was soaked and muddy like his own.
Victoria ran along on her far side. He admired her long brown hair,
also filthy with mud, and her normally pretty face. It would have
been much prettier had it not been covered with bruises from some
earlier mishaps, and soaked with dirty river water. Her white shirt
was torn at the midriff and stained with both coal soot and river
water. None of them was a model of hygiene at that moment.

The passenger door of the MRAP opened and Phil Ramos, ex-police
officer, popped out.

“Come on, Liam. What are you waiting for?” he shouted
as he ran to the front bumper, knelt down, and began shooting the
increasing numbers of infected coming their way.

They reached the rear doors, and he helped Grandma climb the
stairs to get inside. He had no weapons to assist in the defense of
the vehicle, so all he could do was watch the battle. Given all that
he'd been through of late, he was content to sit this one out. He
climbed into the passenger area and took a seat on the long bench
next to Grandma. Victoria remained on her other side, as if to
prevent her from sliding too far in either direction.

For half a minute, the shooting continued, until a command was
given and the rescue team all clambered back into the relative safety
of the metal beast.

“Go!” one of the Scouts screamed.

An older man, likely his dad, put his hand on the kid's knee as he
sat next to him. “We're good. We'll be OK,” he told the
boy.

The engine was already running, so the driver threw it into gear
as soon as the last door shut. The vehicle lumbered down the road in
a direction Liam knew was wrong. They were all pointed toward the
river, but the bridge was out. It was lying in the river.

He shouted, “The bridge is out,” just as the truck
began to decelerate and turn. The driver expertly rounded four lanes
of traffic on the empty highway and then gunned the engine as it
headed back toward the zombies.

“Grandma, will you be OK? I have to see this.”

“I'm fine, dear. Sitting is...heavenly.” Her head was
already nodding in the hot and stuffy truck.

He'd gotten up, but noticed she snapped right back awake as if she
caught herself dozing in class. Something about the look on her face
gave him pause.

“You sure?” he asked in a tentative voice.

She looked at him, but was already tipping over again. Her head
fell to Victoria's shoulder, who held her steady.

Must be the exhaustion.

He tilted his head to Victoria with a weak smile, then held on to
the tie-downs and moved forward. As he arrived in the space between
the driver's area and the rear seats, he saw who was driving the
truck.

“Mel!”

Melissa was a fellow survivor—a shoe saleswoman by her
account—he'd met a week ago in front of his own house. She and
Phil were a tag team of sorts when it came to driving the MRAP.

“Yep. Good to see you too. Now hold on.”

She aimed the truck into the crowd of zombies on the pavement
ahead. Beyond the first loose cadre of zombies were an endless sea of
them. They used the entrance ramp to flood onto the interstate from
the city's center.

The hull shook a little as they ran over the first few. Liam saw
men and women of every shape, color, and dress shambling up the ramp.
Most had bloody messes on their faces and necks. They diverged east
and west on the highway as they came up onto the bridge, ignoring all
rules of the road.

He thought Mel was going to punch through the initial clump of
them to try to continue on the raised bridge, but there was a big
roadblock less than a quarter mile away. This segment was mostly free
of dead vehicles because cars couldn't pass the distant barricade.
She veered directly into the exit ramp going faster than Liam thought
prudent.

“Hang on!” Mel shouted, just as they got into the
thick of the undead.

Liam, unprepared for a collision, fell into the space between Phil
and Mel. The truck shuddered and swerved as it pounded the
pedestrians. The engine roared as Mel kept their speed just above
reckless.

“This ramp was empty when we came up. They must have
followed us,” Phil offered.

By the time Liam got to one knee so he could look out the front,
she had them most of the way around the sweeping left turn of the
ramp. The end was in sight.

Mel had the steering wheel in a death grip. It was vibrating badly
as more of the plague victims fell under the high front cross bar of
a bumper. Blood splashed all over the hood and was beginning to reach
their windshield.

Still she kept her foot on the gas, taking them to the bottom of
the ramp. Liam almost relaxed, until he saw the new roadway. They'd
left the raised highway of the east-west interstate and entered the
north-south highway below which should have taken them out of St.
Louis. Except it was a parking lot.

When the city collapsed, people got in their cars and tried to
head out into the country—anywhere but a city awash in a
growing problem of neighbors biting neighbors. In hours, the
interstates were traffic jams of Biblical proportions. It was
entirely appropriate for the Apocalypse. Even the burly MRAP couldn't
push its way down an endless highway of parked cars.

Mel turned hard to the right. Dangerously so. The MRAP jumped a
high curb while simultaneously slipping on the...remains...of the
crowd of people outside. More blood shot onto the hood. Liam tried to
hold on, but fell to the left and bounced off Mel's seat. He knew she
wanted to say something to him about getting back in his seat, but
she was unable to take her focus from the road.

“I have—”

She turned hard to the right again, and put them on a north south
road going
into
downtown.

“—to find somewhere without so many infected.”

Like most adults, Mel was reticent to use the term “zombie”
to describe the people outside. He'd had philosophical debates
several times over the past few weeks with people who shared her
view. Zombies were from the movies. These things couldn't be
categorized so easily. So people used what terms they could.
“Infected” was most common. “Plaguers” also
gained favor, mostly because the source of the infection was a
disease sort of like Ebola. It was officially called Extra-Ebola, an
understated and simplistic name for a very complicated disease
process which made the victim bleed like they'd caught the worst
equatorial disease imaginable. The joke was: twice the Ebola and
one-half the life expectancy. In fact, it killed people—though
the resulting dead bodies just kept walking around like they didn't
get the memo. And they sought the blood of the living.

After Hayes and his research team had drawn in all the zombies,
the roads nearest the center of the urban core were now thinning out.
It was the direction Mel had them going. As the engine continued to
strain against the still considerable crowd, she tried to plan her
next move.

“We can't afford to stop. If we do, we're dead. We'll never
get this thing moving again against such numbers. I'm going to head
north, then turn west as soon as a street looks passable.”

It took her many blocks in the urban grid before she took a chance
and turned left. The rear end drifted as she made the corner. In
seconds, she had her foot back on the gas and they continued into the
dead.

“My God. It's impossible.” She spoke just loud enough
to be heard over the road noise.

Ahead, the road she'd chosen was arrow-straight for a mile. In the
distance, the number of zombies only grew. To plow through, they'd
need a locomotive. Even that might not be enough. Maybe a tank could
do it. Liam had seen a tank on these streets weeks ago doing that
very thing.

“Oh no.” Mel pointed ahead. Liam followed her finger
to some people on the roof of a small building ahead. It had big
numbers and letters, as if it was the home of a TV station.

Phil replied with equal measure. “We can't help them.”

The people desperately waved their shirts, large sheets that
looked like something a photographer would use for a backdrop, and
many flailing arms. They needed rescue.

“What do we do? There are too many.” Mel seemed to be
considering a rescue, despite Phil's statement against it. Liam
wondered if they were asking him.

This is what he often called the gamer's dilemma. Fight or flight?
To fight is to invite trouble for their group. Any rescue would be
dangerous. Flight...sometimes it was better to survive another day
without getting “involved.” He'd just rescued Grandma
with the help of Victoria. He'd felt he'd risked enough for one day.

He said nothing.

Mel made up her own mind in the absence of input. The MRAP crushed
more bodies while it crossed the median. It fell down into the next
set of lanes and then bounced up on the sidewalk. Mel ran over
several parking meters, a blue mailbox, and sheared off her rearview
mirror while slamming the truck against the concrete wall below the
balcony. She had pulled up directly under the waving people.

“It's up to them if they want to get on. It's the least we
can do for them.”

Liam understood the risks. “But you said we couldn't stop.
Won't we get overrun?”

She looked back at him while taking a pull from a water bottle.
Then she spoke quickly to them all. “I'm giving these guys a
chance. We aren't going to let them in. They can ride on top. We'll
be moving before we get surrounded.”

Liam guessed that would be in about ten seconds.

Far from being a rescue, the pit stop became a horror show. The
people up top were desperate. Their footfalls from jumping the ten
feet from the low balcony were constant. Then people started to fall
off...

While they listened, a pair of men in dress pants and white shirts
fell over the windshield, onto the hood. They threw punches at each
other. The look in their eyes was pure malice even as they slid
together over the blood-soaked metal, then it turned to abject panic
as they slid off the side, out of view. The stomping on the roof
continued as Liam sat frozen on the inside. One of the men who
slipped off the front tried to hop back up near Phil's door, but the
swarming zombies pulled him back down.

“What was I thinking?” Mel asked guiltily.

They'd been parked for thirty seconds. More people fell from the
top. Anyone who slid down the windshield ended up sliding off the
hood too. Then someone figured out they could hold onto the edge of
the roof and fling themselves over the windshield. Mel's view was
about to be obscured. Sure enough, others jumped down and held onto
the legs of those above.

“Lord, forgive me.” Mel stomped on the gas. A few of
the people on the front, those hanging on for their lives, lost them.
One woman lost her grip above them, and she and several people
holding onto her legs went tumbling off the side. It opened up enough
space so Mel could at least see where the truck was going. Her hands
were white with pressure on the wheel. Liam imagined others continued
to fall from the top, but he refused to look out the little side
windows or those on the rear doors. He'd seen enough of the bad side
of humanity to know the desperate survivors would do
anything
to secure their place on the roof.

Mel ran down a few more parking meters, a score of walking sick,
got off the sidewalk, and turned the truck sharply to the right.
Instead of continuing west, she headed back to the east. To downtown.

“We can't make it guys. There's just too many that way. We
need to find somewhere we can wait while all these things clear out.”

If they clear out
, Liam thought.

He knew the zombies had been manipulated during the outbreak so
that when the big tornado sirens all over the city went off, the sick
left their homes to try to escape the noise and the signal within. It
was part of the plan of those responsible for the infection. They
claimed they were worried the sick needed to be motivated to spread
the infection, and the best way to do that was to get them moving.
But those same people also conducted research in a secretive facility
in downtown St. Louis which used that same technology to
bring
them back.
This was why, weeks into the catastrophe, the city was
full once again with those same infected souls.

“Any ideas where we could go would be great, guys.”
Mel's tension was infectious.

Liam turned around to the audience in the back part of the MRAP.
Grandma was still lying against Victoria's shoulder, though he
wondered how she was sleeping through all the bouncing and...the
screams. He could still hear people up on the top arguing and
shouting obscenities at each other. He guessed none of the group had
firearms, primarily because no one had used one yet.

There were three older Boy Scouts, and three Scout dads—or
at least men old enough to be fathers. He didn't have the time or
inclination to assign dads to each of the boys in the back. Right now
they needed everyone to be focused on the only thing that would keep
them alive: somewhere to hide.

One man suggested the Arch, as it had a large park surrounding it,
as well as a subterranean museum which seemed to offer ample
protection from the undead, but Liam reminded him that the Arch
grounds had been bombed heavily during the early days of the plague.
It was now more hellish-looking than Hell's Half Acre. The remains of
the zombies, and the real humans who were caught up in the attack,
littered the place. There was no way Liam would go back there.